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Pakistan’s Missing Voters

By Huma Yusuf August 31, 2012 9:49 amAugust 31, 2012 9:49 am

KARACHI, Pakistan — Pakistan’s upcoming general election, tentatively scheduled for March 2013, could be a rare cause for cheer in this unstable country. If all goes according to plan, this will be the first time in the country’s 65-year history — including 32 under military rule — that an elected civilian government completes a full five-year term.

But electoral rolls released on July 31 were grossly incomplete, and come election day up to 20 million Pakistanis who are eligible to vote might not be able to.

In order to cast a vote, Pakistanis — and only those above 18 — must first register with the National Database and Registration Authority and obtain a computerized national identity card, to be shown at the time of voting.

The total number of eligible voters missing from the lists is probably much higher. Many Pakistanis, especially those living in remote areas, have yet to receive an identity card. (The fact that the number of registered voters in Sindh and Balochistan provinces has dropped significantly since the 2008 general election would seem to confirm this worry.)

Women voters are particularly affected. The latest electoral rolls count 47.77 million men, compared with 36.59 million women — a significant discrepancy given that Pakistan’s male-to-female ratio is 1.06. Although it is skewed in men’s favor, the ratio alone does not account for the gender difference in the electoral rolls (especially because there are even fewer girls than boys under voting age: the male-to-female ratio is 1.07 for Pakistanis between the ages of 15 and 64). As it is, almost 10 million Pakistani women eligible to vote remain unaccounted for.

There are various reasons why more women than men are missing from the electoral rolls. Women are less likely than men to have registered for a computerized ID. In some parts of the country, men discourage female family members from voting in order to limit their participation in public life. Many internally displaced people, particularly those fleeing military operations against militants in the country’s northwestern and tribal regions, have not been able to verify their voter-registration details.

Noting these discrepancies, the government is making an effort to ensure that as many eligible Pakistanis as possible obtain IDs and register. To that end, the national registration authority is currently operating 452 national registration centers, 252 mobile registration vans and 70 semi-mobile units. And to facilitate female registration especially, on Fridays 11 centers run by the national registration authority ar e staffed exclusively by women.

But time is running short. This week, the governing Pakistan Peoples Party announced that it might hold the election earlier than next March. (In all likelihood this is to avoid the risk that its government might be dismissed before the polls — and that the P.P.P. would lose its incumbent’s edge on election day — as a consequence of unfolding legal and political controversies.) Since voter lists are frozen the day elections are announced, millions of Pakistanis may be immediately at risk of seeing their right to vote denied.

No doubt this is the reason that the P.P.P. has formally objected to the new electoral rolls and asked the electoral commission to restore to the lists the names of more than one million voters in Sindh, the party’s main constituency.

Huma Yusuf

Another danger is that, if voter lists remain controversial, a losing party in the election could question the results. This, in turn, could discourage a vast new generation of Pakistani voters from participating in the democratic process. According to the national registration authority, 47 percent of all registered Pakistani voters are between the ages of 18 and 35, and 16.2 million among them are under the age of 25 and will be voting for the first time.

It would be nothing less than tragic if technical shortcomings undermined an election that might otherwise serve as a milestone in Pakistan’s tentative transition to democracy.